Groups or configurations of equipment and other assemblies have been modeled on computers for various purposes. One purpose is to economically optimize the equipment component selections in order to minimize the total cost of the configuration. Another purpose is to determine when equipment components must be manufactured or purchased in order to assemble the configuration. Still another purpose is to display the final configuration such that floor space and power requirements can be analyzed and planned.
Configurations of equipment have historically been modeled on a computer by pre-programming the possible piece-part asemblies with their attributes and interelationships. This approach is useful as long as equipment interactions and component attributes remain unchanged. If new equipment types become available, or if the attributes or interrelationships of old equipments change, the comptuer software must be modified by a skilled programmer to allow for the changes to be modeled. This situation leads to a further difficulty. In a universe of situations, either the program must be modified for each situation, making the maintenance of the various program permutations a time-consuming, expensive chore, or the program must be expanded to include all of the various permutations desired by the various users, resulting in a cumbersome, difficult to maintain program.
A further difficulty with the present modeling techniques is the inability of the computer system to interact with the user, who is forced to think only in terms of the attributes that have been pre-selected by the computer programmer. Novel thinking by the user about alternative approaches to the equipment configuration is not directly realizable. The user has effectively been removed from the model design process, relegating that function to the programmer, who might not be in as good a position to see the advantages of alternative approaches, and cannot react quickly to changed circumstances.
A final difficutly with the present arrangement is the interaction between the vendors of equipment components and the modeling user. A standard modeling arrangement with standard components leads to the equipment vendors relying on the traditional approach to the ultimate equipment configuration, rather than trying to come up with new equipments and configurations to solve old problems in novel ways.